In the recent years, service providers are facing the emergence of new business models based on collaboration with third parties. Companies compete in some areas but associate in others in order to complement their expertise and get synergies.
These changes affect sectors such as Internet, IT and telecommunications, but also providers of non-electronic services. For example, in traditional models the telco, as network provider, pays service providers and charge end users for the use of their services. The new approach is to collaborate with third parties, allowing them to use some telco capabilities (billing, communications, . . . ) to improve their service quality and paying for them or sharing benefits. In the broader new generation business environment concept, not just companies can act as service providers, but also individual developers.
A good example is the case of application stores and open environments, where professional and amateur developers can develop and sell applications under several business models, which are usually simple. The most successful application store is currently Apple AppStore, but many terminal manufacturers and operating system providers also have theirs or plan to launch it: Google, Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm, Nokia . . . .
When the environment operator is a telecommunications company, developers can use functionalities such as SMS, location of billing thanks to the use of open APIs provided by the telco. Most operators have some initiative in this line, like Telefónica Open Movilforum, Telefónica Europe Litmus2, Orange Partners Program or Vodafone Betavine.
The eMarketPlace concept goes much further in this line of collaboration with third parties. The eMarketPlace is a new generation business environment where provider can publish services, applications and products in a managed environment, which controls the business models (prices, revenue sharing, promotions) that are applied for their contracting and use. The eMarketPlace allows providers (both companies and individuals) the reuse of components that are published by third parties to compose complex services, thus reducing the effort they would need to invest if they had to develop the complete functionality by themselves. Composed services can in turn be published in the eMarketPlace and commercialized under predefined business models.
How services are published by service providers and discovered by other service providers in an eMarketplace is shown in FIG. 1. Service provider 1 (1) publishes service 1 (5) in the eMarketPlace (4). Service providers 2 (2) and 3 (3) publish services 2 (6) and 3 (7). Another service provider 4 (9) wants to find services to reuse them as part of a composed service. Descriptions and business models of all services in the eMarketplace (4) are checked by accessing a service catalog (8). When the service provider 4 (9) finds the services that fit his needs, the service is selected and contracted.
How the eMarketPlace offers composed services is shown in FIG. 2. Once service provider 4 (9) has selected the components that are useful for him, service 2 (6) and service 3 (7), and contracted them, he composes a new service (10), that uses service 2 (6) and service 3 (7), and publishes it in the eMarketPlace (4). By adding a commercial offer to this service, it can be purchased by a customer (11), who discovers it via the service catalog (8). The customer (11) does not need to know how many providers are contributing to it (the eMarketPlace will be in charge of managing the relationship with all the providers).
A simplified eMarketPlace architecture based in the TMForum Software Enabled Services Management Solution (SES MS, former Service Delivery Framework) reference architecture, with the main modules that it could include is shown in FIG. 3. The eMarketPlace (4) is accessed by customers (11) and service providers (1) through some user layers (12) where they have facilities to search for services and products, get reports of their incomes or expenses, etc.
Services 1 (5) and 2 (6) can be deployed in any infrastructure (19), but its descriptions are stored in the service catalog (13). It contains functional description of the services, the interfaces to access them, their KPIs, etc. It also contains the business model that is assigned to the service when the provider publishes it. The business model includes the pricing model, the Service Level Agreement, or SLA (14), that are offered, the revenue share model (16) that determines how to distribute the incomes between the provider and the eMarketPlace owner, etc. Business models are defined in the business model catalog (17).
When services are purchased and used, the service quality is measured by a quality of service, or QoS, module (15). QoS is used to determine when the SLA that has been contracted by the customer is violated. This is accomplished in module (14). SLA violations involve penalties for the service provider.
A Business Support System, or BSS, module (18), which can be external to the eMarketPlace, is in charge of charging customers for the use of services (customers can be either end users or providers that use services in their composed services). BSS module (18) is also in charge of paying service providers according to the incomes generated by their services. The amounts to be paid are provided to BSS module by the settlement and revenue sharing calculation module (16). So 16 controls the total incomes generated by each service and the distribution of those incomes among service providers and eMarketPlace owner.
The settlement and revenue sharing module calculates the amounts to be paid to service providers for the incomes generated by their services as informed by the BSS module, taking into account if those services are composed or are components of composed services (as revenues must be distributed among all providers that are involved in the composition). The settlement and revenue sharing module also needs to get the business model of the services, from the business models catalog, to identify the revenue share model and the penalties for SLA violation. Those SLA violations are reported by the SLA module.
Although some companies are launching systems and tools for the commercialization of services and applications, there is no eMarketPlace in the market that includes service and application composition and complex business model definition.
Nowadays, the use of cloud infrastructures is gaining importance, and this is the trend for the next years. A cloud infrastructure can have an associated eMarketPlace for the commercialization of the many services that are deployed in the infrastructure. These services are often offered under a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, in which the user does not install the service in his equipment but it remains in the provider infrastructure and is paid per use. It is usual that some service providers create bundles of SaaS services that they offer to third parties. In this kind of environments, it would be very interesting for the development of composed services, as well as for the bundle creation, to have tools that automatically select the optimal combination of service components by evaluating a number of factors that determine the quality of the combination based on user-configured criteria.
Selecting the most appropriate components to build the composed services or applications is key for the success of a service eMarketPlace. However, this is a complex task, as many aspects should be taken into account. When the number of actors participating in the eMarketPlace grows and the volume of available services increases, it can be extremely difficult for a user to find the ideal components for his composed service on his own. The user does not have detailed access to all the needed information, and even if he had, it might be impossible for him to handle and process such volume of information and come to the right conclusions.
Thus, it is necessary to provide users with tools that perform such selection in an automatic way, taking into account all the relevant factors of the components (functionality, price model, revenue sharing model, SLAs, QoS, success, customer feedback). As it is not possible to find a collection of services or applications that are optimal in all criteria, it is necessary to find the optimal combination by balancing their value for each of them. Besides, all these factors do not be equally important for all users, so the optimization mechanism should give higher weight to some according to subjective perceptions.
Another important issue when the selection of components is completed is the definition of the business terms and conditions of the service that composes all of them. Those terms and conditions follow some rules and restrictions due to the terms and conditions of the aggregated components, and those depend on the policies that are defined in each eMarketPlace.
There are some solutions to help select products in electronic eMarketPlaces as patent WO 01/9903 A1, but there is no service composition involved. It is aimed at selecting individual products as compared to other products in the eMarketPlace, not to selecting groups of interrelated services where there is a need to balance the score of each of them for the selection criteria and take into account the constraints that the individual business models impose to the models of the composed service.